Practical tips for small biz owners

Do you have services or products that you love, but your customers are unwilling to pay for? Are some of your offerings no longer profitable but you find yourself resistant to removing them from your website?

In business we call these “sacred cows,” the untouchables that are exempt from questioning. Often you are emotionally attached to them because you developed them yourself, spending huge amounts of time and money to bring them to the light.

Sacred cows don’t only include unprofitable or unwanted products and services. Sometimes you have a vendor or contractor who needs to be released because their quality has slipped. Sometimes you need to look at tasks and processes that are ineffective time-wasters.

Don’t hold on to sacred cows: they’ll suck your business dry. During your business reinvention, look at all aspects of your business and cut things that no longer serve your customers or the goals of your business.

When reinventing our businesses, we’re often in a state of “not knowingness.” Questions swirl in your head:

What do I want to become?

What’s next for my business?

What do my customers want?

What’s the right path to take to reach my goals?

NOT having answers to these questions can make you feel restless, uncertain, and even fearful. But this state of not-knowingness is an important part of the cycle of business transformation, reinvention and growth. Instead of jumping in to choose an answer — any answer — try finding comfort in this ambiguity.

Here’s why…

Sitting in the mystery of not-knowingness is a state of grace, a chance to ask all the important questions, a chance to reexamine your values and your personal goals as they relate to your business.

It also allows all sorts of creative ideas to percolate to the surface. If you jump at creating a set plan because you can’t stand to be in the not-knowingness, you’ll miss the opportunity for incredible options to come to your awareness.

And people who can tolerate uncertainty can also tolerate risk better. Being calm and staying centered when you don’t know the answers to the big questions will help you develop other important skills, like dealing with chaos and conflict.

Here’s the trick…

The trick is deciphering whether you’re staying in not-knowingness because you haven’t explored all the creative opportunities yet, or whether you’re staying in not-knowingness because it means you don’t have to make a decision — you stay in not-knowingness because it’s safe there and you get stuck there for a long, long time.

If you can never come up with answers to the big questions or you resist making a decision on those answers, you’re stuck. And the best way I know to get unstuck is a two-step process:

Deciding to decide – make a commitment that you’re going to do serious work on the not-knowingness and that you will choose from among the options you come up with.

Get together with trusted friends and colleagues, tell them the big questions for which you don’t yet have an answer, and brainstorm together some possible ideas.

Learning to be okay with ambiguity and not-knowingness can be a great springboard for the future of your business. This moment holds immense possibility for you to explore. But if you’re resisting the exploration or the making of decisions and taking action, get some help and support in the process.